A day three years in the making came Friday as Crazy Mountain Brewing, the Vail Valley-based brewer that has won fans beyond Colorado’s borders, opened the doors of its tap room in Denver.

Breckenridge Brewery gave Crazy Mountain first dibs on its 50-barrel brewhouse space at 471 N. Kalamath St. as it prepared to move to a new farm-style brewery complex in Littleton. Crazy Mountain started brewing last year in the space, which has a much larger capacity and already has become its main production facility for bottles. Crazy Mountain’s Edwards brewery and tap room still are open, but owners Kevin and Marisa Selvy have said they may shift to a more specialized focus there.

On Friday, after two nights of soft openings, the tap room and Texas-style barbecue restaurant opened its doors to the public.

Crazy Mountain Tap Room + BBQ is operated by Beaver Creek-based Group970 Restaurants, while Crazy Mountain will operate the brewing space and a “speakeasy” between the offices and the restaurant.

How do you fit the best Colorado beers from 2015 into one list? It’s not easy — and it’s a long list.

Colorado is home to at least 327 licensed craft breweries now and producing creative and quality liquids.

As the year comes to a close, the First Drafts team sought to do the near-impossible: Name all our favorite Colorado beers in the past 12 months, the new releases and our favorite go-tos. The contributors included John Frank, Jeremy Meyer, Jon Murray and Jenn Fields. At the top, we picked our top beers and then listed our other favorites below. (Again, these are not the “best” beers, but just the picks that pleased our palates. Some of our favorite local brews didn’t even make the list.)

John Frank’s favorite: Black Project, RamjetThe funky sister brewery to Former Future let this sour red ferment in the wild (AKA the coolship), put it in a red wine barrel with Montmorency cherries and aged in the bottle for months before the June release. With a touch more of funk in the bottle, Ramjet is tart and complex with flavors of oak and cherries, earning a GABF bronze in the wide-ranging experimental beer category.

Jeremy Meyer’s favorite: Odell Brewing, BrazzleYou would think a raspberry beer would be red or pink, not gold. But this standout beer by one of Colorado’s oldest breweries made a sublime sour using 300 pounds of golden raspberries, not red ones. The concoction was aged in oak barrels and fermented with wild yeast, creating a gentle, golden sour that was gone before you knew it.

Two examples of old and new labels at Crazy Mountain Brewery on Tuesday, December 08, 2015 at its Denver brewery. (Photo by Cyrus McCrimmon/The Denver Post)

“As a brewer, it pains me to say that (a beer’s label) is more important than the liquid inside.”

It may sound like blasphemy, but this is what Crazy Mountain Brewing’s Kevin Selvy told our First Drafts colleague Alicia Wallace in a Sunday story about how labels are becoming crucial to selling beer in the crowded craft market.

Effective branding is a combination of what’s on the craft beer vessel and what’s inside it, Selvy told Wallace. “If your label can’t become ingrained in somebody’s memory the first time they see it, you haven’t done an effective job,” Selvy said. “And then the liquid’s got to be good, otherwise they won’t come back and get it again. The branding has to be on cue, because if it’s not, it doesn’t matter how good the liquid is.”

The two are more than a precursor to GABF. Based on the crowds and the beers, it’s easy to see why some beer fans consider them better than the main event.

Beers Made by Walking may be the most underappreciated event of the week. This year it took place in the parking lot next to Our Mutual Friend Brewing in the River North district and featured roughly 30 breweries — including a number not pouring on the GABF floor — with inventive, nature-inspired beers.

At Denver’s Goldspot Brewing, the “beer for beginners” on tap is a crisp, clean, kolsch-style ale with a pretty cool backstory.

For the uninitiated, kolsch is sort of a distant German cousin to the light American lager — crystal clear and not too hoppy or bitter.

Goldspot co-owner and head brewer Matt Hughes decided to put his stamp on the style after his wife wanted something lighter than his high-octane homebrews. After fermentation, Hughes added warm honey gathered by his beekeeper father to give it a sweet kiss.

The brewer named the beer Julia’s Blessing, for his better half.

As breweries continue to multiply in Colorado, a growing number are searching for alternatives to conventional blonde ales, ambers and other old standbys that serve as gateway beers for craft beer newbies.

Last month’s news that Elysian Brewing in Seattle was selling out to Anheuser-Busch InBev sent ripples through American craft brewing like no other acquisition before it.

Here was a brewery that stands as a bedrock of the movement, whose guiding light on the brewing side literally wrote the book on how to start an independent craft brewery, that had just released a collaboration beer with an indie rock label with the tag line “corporate beer still sucks,” giving in to the supposed forces of darkness.

“I would say it was quite a surprise from a brewery that has been in business the past two decades,” said Wallace, CEO of Left Hand Brewing in Longmont. “We look at them as contemporaries. I am shocked (AB) was able to get somebody like that.”

Breckenridge Brewery is deep into negotiations with a Denver developer that intends to lease the brewery’s real estate on Kalamath Street to Crazy Mountain Brewing, Breckenridge brewmaster and general manager Todd Usry confirmed Monday.

Breckenridge has a “hard letter of intent” to sell to the developer but is not yet under contract, Usry said. The sale also is to include the Cherry Cricket in Cherry Creek North, another piece of the Breckenridge/Wynkoop company portfolio. Usry declined to go into much further detail until things are finalized.

This is the second installment in this year’s series of previews of breweries pouring at the 2014 Great American Beer Festival, which opens Thursday in Denver. We’ve invited beer writers from across the country to weigh in on the GABF 2014 regions. We’ve also asked everyone to throw in a few wild cards – breweries from anywhere in the country they want to check out.

Kokpelli Beer Company’s new digs in Westminster (provided by Kokopelli).

Our latest roundup of Colorado craft beer news …

What promises to be another big year for Colorado brewery openings begins with a couple of new brewpubs … on Thursday night, The Post Brewing Co. opened in a former VFW hall in Lafayette promising hot chicken and cold beer. The brewery posted an Instagram photo 15 minutes after opening of a full house. The initial beer menu posted online spotlights the guest taps from Avery, Grimm Brothers, Upslope, Dogfish Head and Firestone Walker alongside a Post collaboration with Lafayette brothers-in-arms Odd 13 Brewing. The head brewer is former Dogfish Head brewer Bryan Selders.

Our new iPad app serves as a guide to metro Denver’s bountiful breweries, beer bars and bottle shops, the holy trinity of craft beer enjoyment for followers and fans. Download the app for iPad .
Next time you head for a beer in Boulder, don’t forget your friend, Beers of Boulder and Boulder County, an iPad app from the Daily Camera. Download the app for iPad .

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In Colorado, our pint glasses overflow with excellent beer. New breweries, new batches, festivals every other week. How lucky are we? First Drafts is The Denver Post's beer blog aimed at helping you keep tabs on the state's ever-expanding craft beer culture. We offer a mash of news, event coverage, homegrown stories, tasting notes and tips to help you imbibe. Expert drinker or homebrewer? Let us know what you're loving about Colorado's beer scene. Not sure exactly what a firkin is? No worries, let us be your guide. Go ahead. Belly up and drink it in!